Last week I showed you how to extract a 3D Lara from one of the classic Core Design Tomb Raider games so that you can use it as a base model to make into a papercraft vignette. I used some generic examples, but the vignette I'm making now is Lara using the cannon at the end of the Tomb Raider III Crash Site level! 😀
Now, for some reason when I made my first "Young Lara Croft" papercraft Tomb Raider vignette, I decided to scale Lara 120% (the reason was that I felt the paper model was a but to small of course 😉) and I've done that ever since with all the new papercraft Tomb Raider vignettes so that they all fit together.
After extracting Lara and the big cannon, she fitted pretty much perfectly on the standard square platform I use for my vignettes; but when I scaled her to 120%, the cannon and Lara wouldn't fit on the platform of course... So to solve that, I moved the handles of the cannon from the back to the top and honestly it doesn't look half bad I think! 🙂
Even though I love using the actual game models so the papercraft vignette could look exactly like in the games, if you examine them more closely you'll see that the papercrafts are usually changed a bit to fit the vignette better - but I think you're too busy blowing up velociraptors to examine exactly what the cannon looks like in the game... 😋
As for the re-modelling the model: I always like to break up a 'complex' model into separate pieces that can be built and assembled together much easier than one big, hollow shape. So breaking up the cannon into six or seven pieces might seem like more work, but I think it'll actually be easier this way.
And as I mentioned so many times before: using a video game model as a base reference for a papercraft is great because you can examine it and make it look (almost, as I explained before 😉) just like in the video game, but they usually do need some work to make the papercraft actually buildable.
This is usually evident in the joints like the neck, shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, thighs, knees, ankles... So these usually need re-modelling, but also any other parts that will just be unnecessarily tricky to fold and glue out of paper, like really tiny pieces that can be re-modelled to basically look the same with less pieces. 😉
Especially these classic Tomb Raider models which look so "blocky" at first glance look perfect for papercraft and unfolding with Pepakura Designer, but you'll find that the pieces will all be separated and you won't be able to glue them together because all the pieces intersect each other in the digital model, which isn't possible with a paper model of course...
And once you start re-modelling, you will find that the game textures will become messed up on the model because they are laid out ("mapped") to a specific shape and if you change that shape, the "map" isn't correct anymore of course. You can try working in the existing textures and just editing the texture map, but I usually find it easier to create a new texture that fits the re-modelled model better to start with.
This way you can avoid stretched textures like the backpack straps, which happens for example if you create a nice and straight texture image, while the shape it has to get mapped to is angled and stretched... This is even the case on the original in-game Lara, for example on the backpack straps, so you'll have to edit and re-map the texture images anyway. That way you can also give Lara back her belly button, which on the original in-game Lara wasn't visible because of the way the textures were mapped...! 😋
And that way you will go back and forth until you're happy with the 3D Lara and cannon that you can unfold in Pepakura Designer into a papercraft model that you can actually assemble. 🙂
Stay tuned!
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